Carl Schmitt is known to us as a prominent Nazi. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and called for burning of books by Jewish authors. He was appointed State Councillor of Prussia by Göring. The SS gave him trouble in 1936 but he retained his professorship at the University of Berlin till 1945.
But Schmitt is also the author of penetrating political analyses, and has attracted the interest of people like tech billionaire Peter Thiel and neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin.
The Concept of the Political was first published in 1932. This analysis is from a translation by C.J. Miller published in 2020. The book is short: eight chapters in 63 pages.
I.
Schmitt starts by noticing that nobody has ever defined the political. Mostly it is used to contrast with other antitheses such as "politics and economics, politics and morals, politics and law" and even the antithesis between politics and civil law. He observes that
In general, “political” is in some way equated with “state,” or at least related to the state. The state then appears as something political, to political as something related to the state[.]
Sometimes the political is understood in legal opinions in a technical sense, for instance in the concept of "political association" or "political assembly." In the progress from the absolute state of the 18th century to the limited state of the 19th century to the democratic state of the 20th century the understanding of the state and society changed as people began to deal with the penetration of the state into all social affairs.
II.
So what is the political? Schmitt sets forth the following definition.
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
It is easy to compare the friend-enemy distinction to others, such as “good and evil in the moral; beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic”. But it is a mistake to imagine that the political is related to these other distinctions, because only in politics does disagreement lead to conflict.
[The enemy] is just the other, the stranger… so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible.
Conflicts, he points out, cannot be decided by "a general norm," nor by the the decree of a 'disinterested' and therefore 'impartial' third party." Only the participants in a conflict can decide
whether the otherness of the stranger in the concrete case of conflict means the negation of their own form of existence, and whether he must be repulsed or fought off in order to preserve their own way of life in accordance with their being.
Of course, the enemy is easily thought of as "evil." But the "evil" need not be the enemy. The political, and its "friend-enemy" distinction, is independent of other distinctions.
III.
Although the political is independent of other distinctions, people have tried to soften the friend-enemy distinction: in business, liberalism has softened the enemy into competitor. In a moral world there are hopefully only debate opponents. But, aside from hopes and aspirations, the friend-enemy distinction is something apart.
Thus the enemy is not a competitor or opponent in the general sense. He is also not a private opponent whom one hates with a feeling of antipathy. The enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collective of people confronts another fighting collective. The enemy is always a public enemy[.]
The political is the most extreme kind of human antagonism, and any antagonism "becomes more political the more it gets to the extreme point." And, of course, the more extreme that political antagonisms get within a state, the closer they get to civil war.
The word “conflict,” he writes, “does not mean competition” or “debate” or the routine “struggle” of life. It means killing.
The terms friend, enemy, and conflict… refer specifically to the real possibility of physical killing.
IV.
What about religion? According to Schmitt, when a disagreement between religions escalates into a “religious war,” the war is political, because the opposing religions experience each other as enemies. Same with the Marxist “class struggle.” It may start out as economic or cultural, but when it escalates to civil war -- or world revolution -- we are talking about the classes experiencing each other as enemies, not merely as ordinary exploiters or average wage earners.
Of course, the political is not the source of absolute power: the state dare not abolish the right of workers to strike. And various associations can combine in an alliance against the state. But whatever power associations may have
Neither a church, nor a trade union, nor an alliance of the two would have prevented a war that the German Reich under Bismarck wanted to wage.
And whatever the power and influence of different sectors in society, it remains that the "possibility of grouping friend and enemy" is "decisive in relation to the other associations."
V.
The state -- as political entity -- contains enormous power, waging war with human lives at its disposal to send out and kill other people. But the point of its power is to create the "normal state" where "peace, security, and order" obtain. But this leads to the need to identify "internal enemies" as genuine threats. This could mean "ostracism, banishment... the declaration of the enemy within the state" that can escalate to actual civil war. At this point, of course, the "constitutional" state is dissolved until the struggle is decided.
A member of a church may die for his faith, but only as a "private matter." An "economically oriented society" can deal with "troublemakers" by non-violent means, for to kill people for an economic purpose "is horrible and insane." But conflict is different. War is not "normative", it is "existential," and "a real struggle against a real enemy, not in any ideals, programs, or norms."
Thus, the idea of a just war is nonsense, or political propaganda. So is the idea of "outlawing" war. If a people is determined to maintain its existential existence, then it must be prepared to decide for itself who is a friend and who is an enemy, and act upon this decision.
If a people fears the toils and risks of political existence, another people will relieve it of these toils by taking over its "protection against external enemies"and thus its political rule[.]
Either a people provides for its own protection or it must be obedient to another that secures protection for it. A people that has subcontracted its protection to another is not long for this world for "a weak people disappears" as a political entity.
VI.
Because the political "presupposes the real possibility of the enemy" it means that the idea of a world state is nonsense. It would require a world in which nobody feared an enemy. And a world without enemies would be a world without politics. Thus "humanity cannot wage war" because the notion "excludes the concept of an enemy." So, whenever a state wages war in the name of "humanity" it "wishes to cheat" according to Proudhon.
Thus the idea of the League of Nations (or the United Nations) as an association of humanity is nonsense. It is a club of nations, an "intergovernmental association which presupposes the existence of states." And if a "world state" ever existed, the next question is "who will be given the terrible power of an economic and technical centralization covering the whole world?"
VII.
There is an ongoing question of whether man is good or evil, but Schmitt asserts that political theories are clear on this
[T]he strange... observation remains that all genuine political theories presuppose man as evil... as a dangerous and dynamic being.
Indeed, it is by recognition of this that a thinker reveals himself as a political thinker. Schmitt quotes Hegel and Lenin to show how they understand the nature of the "enemy" the "people" and the "conflict." Except, of course that for Lenin the "people" is a class.
Political thought and political instinct thus prove their worth theoretically and practically in their ability to distinguish friend from enemy.
On the other hand the inability to make the friend-enemy distinction "appears as a symptom of the political end". And he proposes the Russian nobility before the revolution, the "relativist bourgeoisie" and the ancien régime aristocrats of France as people that did not see who the enemy was.
VIII.
Although "liberal thought" pretends to ignore the state and politics and imagine human interaction in terms of "ethics and economics, intellect and business, education and property" and care only about the individual, in its actions liberalism smuggles power and politics in the back door.
[It] no longer knows war, but only executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and peacekeeping missions. The enemy is no longer called the enemy but in return he is set up as a threat to peace[.]
Thus a war is turned into a "'crusade' or 'the last war of mankind' using an array of propaganda". So, "this allegedly apolitical and apparently even anti-political system either serves existing groupings of friends and enemies, or leads to new ones, and is unable to escape the logic of the political."
One can say that, since Carl Schmitt, the Nazi, published The Concept of the Political in 1932, nothing has changed.
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